Pitch Where You Live

[Niall Munnelly]

You’ve always been one of my favorite writers, Jay.

Vienna, like Köln, has great historical significance for me, musically -
Kompakt, Kölner Schule in one, the Mego constellation in the other. I
shouldn’t base my decisions on old labels and bands, but I must say
Louisville, Kentucky worked out great along those lines!


Yours,
Niall.


On Sun, Feb 25, 2024 at 12:12 PM Jay Vaughan <ibisum at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> > I hope to meet Jay in Vienna this year.
>
>
> Vienna is a great place to live, its very comfortable, you can walk
> everywhere.  I lived for most of my time here so far, outside the city -
> which was also great, to be honest, as Austrian countryside is beautiful in
> a way that many other places aren’t.  I bought an electric motorbike for
> the countryside, but have hardly used it since I moved into the city, as I
> walk/bicycle everywhere and find that really fine.  Public transportation
> is superlative - you can literally get anywhere you need to go in the city,
> easily enough, with the trains and street cars and so on.
>
> Art and culture - well, its not without its calcification (one can only
> hear a Mozart re-interpretation so many times per year), but I fully enjoy
> my sojourns throughout the city being soundtrack’ed by the street musicians
> which the city promotes in various of the most popular public spaces.  Of
> course, my employer opens many doors in this regard that Vienna has to
> offer.  There is a strong and vibrant electro-accoustic scene here (MicZac
> could probably elucidate) but I have found that the music scene generally
> is not as interesting as say, Berlin or Köln - just because operators of
> these entertainment businesses have to cater to the local tastes, which are
> fundamentally socialist of the deleterious variety and thus quite banal.
> There are very few risk taking scenes here in Vienna, and even the
> so-called punks are of the conservative Austrian type if you scratch the
> surface.  There is much cultural appropriation and fakery here which would
> be distasteful to you if you weaned your pop culture eyeballs on the
> streets of, for example, London - which has its own variant of the same
> theme, of course, leading to sensitivity perhaps.
>
> And this is true also of food - sure, you can find great Asian food in
> Vienna, but it will be slightly modified to appeal more to the tastebuds of
> folks who grew up with the bland routine of grandma’s schnitzel, more than
> those who value variety and surprises in their lives.
>
> To get to the real good stuff, you have to be willing to pierce the
> cultural veil that presents itself in the architecture of the city.  The
> districts really are laid out according to class structure, which any
> dyed-in-the-wool Marxist will recognize immediately as a persistent source
> of strife even in the modern era.  This city is a giant snail shell of
> class warfare, encoded in the streets and architecture of the imperialist
> era in which Austria once reigned.  The architecture of the city can be
> very, very oppressive - you have city blocks of people who don’t know their
> neighbors, even though they live right on top of each other, and who would
> never even bother to leave the boxes of their lives to meet strangers.
> That can be a limiting factor for someone wanting to move to a city to
> relieve themselves of the same kinds of burdens experienced elsewhere.
>
> But, it is a delightful place to live, I have to say.  I regularly enjoy
> the fruits of the city, its nightlife and museums and artistic culture, but
> I had to work hard to pierce what I perceived at first to be a repressive
> conservatism that blankets the culture, even today.  I think this is true
> of any city in which a person arrives as a stranger.
>
> I’m looking forward to showing you around some time Niall, and given your
> new horizons, it would be great to see you move here - it should also be
> noted that Vienna is the gateway to so many wonderful other cultures and
> peoples - I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring the Balkans since I moved here,
> with Vienna’s geography and superlative train systems providing easy
> regular visits from Prague to Belgrad, Llubljane and Zagreb and Pula and
> Split, and beyond (Pristina, Kosovo!).  Keep that in mind: Vienna is a
> gateway away from the west, which is probably what you are really looking
> for in life right about now ..
>
> j.
> —
> Jay Vaughan
> ibisum at gmail.com
>
>
>
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